Before Wong Kit Yi had to appear for her nerve-wracking MFA admission interview at Yale, she consulted a Chinese fortuneteller. The old woman threw "holy wood," consulted a prophetic calendar, and read cards of divination; for an additional $50, she offered to have powerful gods climb into Wong's mouth on the day of the interview. Wong played the subsequent video, Fate-calculating (2010), during her assessment and left the room in stitches. While Wong uses her work to grapple with things beyond her understanding, there is often an idiosyncratic lightheartedness to it. She has engaged a conductor to orchestrate the noises of snacking in Manhattan's Chinatown; combined William Blake poems with creases left by bed sheets; invited young women via Craigslist to swallow a secret whispered into her mouth; written about smell, in letters made from cookie dough; exhibited used bars of soap imprinted with various descriptions of love. Soon, she will be setting out for a residency at the North Pole which, we hope, takes the sting out of being "banned" from the 2014 Xinjiang Biennale.
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